It's hard to explain this to electronic bands today but you had a very good chance of being beaten up when we started out in the late 70s. I've kept little pieces of paper from people saying things like "This isn't music" and "I'm going to kill you after the show". It wasn't a fight like feminism, but it was necessary.

The promise of electronic music was always that you could very directly articulate what you wanted to say. Synthesis at its highest level is a very direct thing: you turn this and push that and you can go where you needed to go very fluently. When we started out we all were driven to be very direct and blunt. The promise was one of purity of expression – a purity that gets this shit out of your head. We used tapes and synthesisers and machinery that had been derided and discarded. Learning how to play guitar would have been like learning a second language – although now I understand that guitars can be articulate in that way.

Bands like Sonic Youth treated guitars like a noise system they could use. It was their solution to the same problem.

When everything went digitial with CDs and DAT tapes in the mid-80s it was a real learning curve for everyone. We were sold this Platonic idea of perfection: you could make everything perfect. The engineers loved it. It took the musicans and the poets to say it's not really working. It took 10 years for everyone to realise that being digital meant you could really mess with and distort and rearrange things.

On stage now, we use iPads like we used to use tape machines – you can put the music through the tape heads and scratch it. People are nostalgic for the old technology but we constantly struggle not to be embedded in the past. The question is: what do we want? We want to grab a sound and stretch it – and what will do that best? It's the iPad. We're not interested in the artefact, we're interested in the result.

Other people get hung up on using old Moogs. But it doesn't make their music any more authentic. There's no such thing as authentic or inauthentic music. A Negro spiritual is only authentic if it's sung by the original slave.

You can disappear up your arse if you don't constantly reassess what you do. People always want us to play live and to play the old hits. They're deeply offended if you change anything. But I don't even see the need for us to be there on stage, standing there pushing things around. I don't want to be looked at. I'm not an interesting person – it's just that I'm able to create these things that are interesting. I'm the box that the toy comes in. The visuals that we create for the show support and sustain the music, and vice versa.

I'm much more interested in the computer game I've created for the Adelaide festival, Hauntology House. It's what musical albums are in 2013. There's enough vinyl in the world.

There are the blockbuster computer games like Halo, which are made by big companies, with hundreds of people involved, and then there is the independent industry, particularly in places like Japan, which is where everything that is interesting is happening. There is a whole class of indie games where it doesn't matter if you win or lose, full of bizarre ideas.

I've seen these guys start to refer to their games as albums, so why can't I as a musician make a game myself? There's a lot to explore, there's a lot of pleasure for any musician there.

Severed Heads live at the Adelaide festival. Photograph: Alicia Canter for the Guardian

It is hard. Making electronic music used to be really hard. When we started out, we'd read the NME, which would reach us in Australia by ship. We'd read about a gig that happened three months ago, and think, "I like the sound of that, I'll try and make something that sounds like it" - and we'd end up with something that sounded unique.

Making music today is much easier, thanks to programs like Ableton or FruityLoops. But you've got to get out of the mentality that says "if I just push this button, I'll get a result". You have to really bend things as hard as you can. And designing games is helpful like that. Something might take 12 months to make, not 12 minutes, and that for some people can be very valuable.

I had the idea for my game in 1994; I sketched it out in 1999; I built the prototypes in 2000-2002; then I had to do things like work out how to feed myself and get a job; and the game is only finished now.

When technology is exciting, it's exciting. When it's not, it's not. Facebook is boring. Twitter is just like CB radio. There's nothing new there. There are underlying principles of creativity that go beyond the technology that was available to you at the time. Certain things are beautiful and there are certain things that will always comfort you - and all these things will be kept over the years, whether it gets delivered by Google or Facebook or whoever. The names come and go.

Tom Ellard of Severed Heads was talking to Caspar Llewelyn Smith. The band played at the Queen's Theatre as part of the Adelaide Festival on 13 March. You can play Hauntology House online.